TikTok which has been raising alarms in many countries over its data handling has just been fined £12.7 million by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Charges include that they allowed millions of underage UK children to use their platform without parental or caregiver consent, and that they failed to properly protect children’s data.
Fear of penalties, litigation and reputational backlash has prompted a surprising number of companies, 42%, to pressure their IT and security staff to hide data breaches from regulators and customers, according to Bitdefender’s 2023 Cybersecurity Assessment. The survey of more than 400 IT professionals at companies of more than 1,000 employees, found that while 94% report being very or somewhat confident in their security tools, 52% had a data breach in the last 12 months and 29% admitted to not reporting a breach.
The new chatbot, rolled out to select users late March, is slated for incorporation into Google products in the coming months. But the Center for Digital Hate found it generating 100 false and potentially harmful narratives, including on climate, Covid-19, LGBTQ+, antisemitism, and racism.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.